Salome

Video Design / February 2023

Opéra – Création Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna, february 2023

In Salome, composer Strauss confronts a princess harassed by her stepfather with a captive prophet who recognizes in her not the desirable young woman but the traumatized child. When the prophet Jochanaan, desired by Salome, rejects the young princess, however, she prevails upon her stepfather Herod to behead him.

Music: The one-hundred-minute one-act play glows like a feverish frenzy; the composer courageously exploded both the sound and moral concepts of his time. To this day, the music captivates the listener with its enormous imagery, highly charged emotionality and sharp, sometimes garish characterisation. Strauss not only portrays the decadent, sultry atmosphere of the royal court, which has Salome’s childhood on its conscience, with a tremendous orchestral artistry, but also shows a differentiated fanning out of the external and internal psychological events in a captivating way.

Direction: In his direction of Salome, Cyril Teste wants to make Salome’s energy and heartbeat tangible, to make her traumas real and to fundamentally tell the family history of a powerful dynasty whose inner mechanisms must produce what is at the end: Destruction.

Opéra de Richard Strauss • direction musicale Philippe Jordan • mise en scène Cyril Teste • dramaturgie Sergio Morabito • scénographie Valérie Grall • costumes Marie La Rocca • lumières Julien Boizard • vidéo Mehdi Toutain-Lopez • chef opérateur Rémy Nguyen • chorégraphie Magdalena Chowaniec • assistante à la mise en scène Céline Gaudier • avec Gerhard Siegel, Michaela Schuster, Malin Byström, Iain Paterson, Daniel Jenz, Patricia Nolz, Thomas Ebenstein, Andrea Giovannini, Carlos Osuna, Evgeny Solodovnikov, Clemens Unterreiner, Attila Mokus, Ilja Kazakov, Stephano Park, Ferdinand Pfeiffer, Daniel Lökös et la participation de Jana Radda et Anna Chesnova •